iPhone 8 and iOS 11 issues I experienced

This may be an isolated case, I don’t know, but may this be a few words of warning if you intend to get an Apple iPhone 8 with iOS 11 at the moment. Over a 4 day period, 3 apple store visits, several support calls to various senior engineers, and a number of online support chats I wasn’t able to successfully get the phone working in a usable state, and in the end was told to turn the device off and disconnect from the mains for safety grounds.

Some of the bigger issues

let’s take a look at some of the issues:

1. Severe overheating – I woke up to find the iPhone 8 was dangerously hot. Like REALLY hot. I was scared so I powered it off and disconnected it from the mains. At this point it didn’t really have anything on it, so I was surprised how hot it got. Thereafter on plugging in to the mains it got warm, hot then significantly hot! The Apple assistant in Covent Garden said it was probably because of the bricked Apple Watch issue. Other assistants said the battery was fine and this was normal behaviour for the phone. However a couple of technicians took the issue seriously and told me to turn the phone off and disconnect it from the mains on safety ground. By this time the phone wasn’t in a useable state so it was a relative no brainer to take it back and get a refund. Especially when the senior engineer said there was nothing wrong with the phone, and it is normal behaviour (including all the bugs below) – I’m certainly not going to put myself through this with another device.
2. Apple ID issues – I use one apple ID for iCloud (paid subscription) and one apple ID for iMessage/Facetime/iTunes (paid content). However this no longer works in iOS 11. There was no way of using the correct ID without 2 wipes of the phone to factory settings, then setting the phone up as a new phone, then logging in with my iMessage ID, then logging out of iCloud, then logging into iCloud with my iCloud ID. I followed the instructions to wipe the phone a third time. Unfortunately this time it would not allow me to log out of iCloud – the Sign out button no longer works, so I could not resolve this. The results was that iMessage and FaceTime were no longer associated with my email addresses, which breaks the experience some what!
3. Connectivity issues – This was most alarming, 3G, 4G and wifi were not working, turning airplane on/off (an old trick that usually get’s it going) did not work, neither did turning on/off 4G. But then I noticed accidentally that data was working in Safari still. But not in the OS (like Maps) or any apps! Then only way I could get the data working again was turning the iPhone 8 off and on again. Maybe a bug with iOS 11 or maybe an iPhone 8 issue, not sure.
4. Skype no longer works, at all – This is apparently related to how iOS handles connections – and perhaps exacerbated by the connectivity issues I was getting above. But nope, Skype no longer works with iPhone 8 / iOS 11, Skype say they are working on a fix, but this is not great.

Issues of personal taste?

Here are some things about the device, maybe personal taste? But for me they are issues:

1. The home button is horrible, it’s not a button, I’m not sure how to describe the click, but it’s really unnatural, and not like a button any more. I don’t know when that change happened. But to my taste it’s horrible!
2. No earphone port. There’s been a lot of press on this, and I though I could get over it. But I can’t. You can’t charge the phone whilst listening to music or speaking on the phone through the mic. Seriously! That’s not great. In addition the new phones are lighting, but lighting doesn’t plug into my Mac. So I can’t use the earphones with anything other than the phone. That sucks.
3. Power + Home: no longer resets the phone. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. And I’ve given up trying to google solutions for all the issues, but nope, power + home does a variety of things, but no longer resets the device. No idea how to do that anymore. Can power it off still, but no quick reboots are possible (and you’re going to be turning the iPhone 8 on and off a lot in an attempt to get it working).
4. The slick / slippery glass back is really annoying. Looks gorgeous right? But isn’t gloss glass slippery? Yep. Yep and it’s got a bump where the camera is. Not an issue for the iPhone 6 Plus – it wasn’t slippery. But if you place the 8 on a flat service (especially with a cable connected) it slips around everywhere – especially awkwardly with the bump. It’s just a really dumb idea / bad user experience. Maybe it’s taste, but it’s really really annoying.

Other bugs – hardware or software?

Some other bugs, maybe iOS, maybe Hardware:

1. Not charging from MacBook Pro – I’m told there’s nothing wrong with the phone from the diagnostics. But I couldn’t get it to charge off my MacBook Pro. I’ve had no issues with any other devices – so I’m hoping it’s not my MacBook Pro’s problem – but nope, tried every port, plugin it in and out again and couldn’t get it to charge.
2. Air drop no longer works. Yep. No more transferring files with this device. Could not get airdrop working, neither could the apple support assistant on the call. This is a shame, but then airdrop was a bit hit or miss before this, so I don’t know if this is a hardware of software fault.
3. Screen sharing via quicktime no longer works. Again, the support assistant said that’s not right, but we couldn’t figure out a way of getting it working. A small thing, but a shame to use a great feature.
4. Apps, apps, apps – none of my settings came across. That means every app has to be logged in, or initiated a fresh. EVERY app. Hours and hours and hours wasted.
5. Broken 2FA & internet banking – All internet banking apps, VIP keys, and 2FA authentication keys failed to come across – and I gave up trying to figure out how to transfer. Lucky I didn’t wipe my current phone (that still works).
6. Lots LOTS of apps no longer work. You have the option of deleting them, or leaving them downloaded in a unusable state. I’d say 30 – 40% of the apps I have installed suffered the same fate. There’s just some apps I’m not prepared to lose to be honest. This is obviously an iOS 11 issue.
7. Dodgy performance. It took about 7 hours to get some of the apps installed on the 3rd wipe / reinstall. No idea what was going on with the device. But when I did occasionally get to use the phone there were intermittent performance issues. Like buttons being pressed and not responding, even after several taps. Typing sometimes would take several seconds to catchup with the taps. Things like that. It’s meant to be faster but this iPhone 8 had some fundamental problems.
8. Dodgy call quality. Call quality dodgy mostly for when I did get to test this. Several times I got loud popping of bell noises on an in progress call – so much that it hurt my ears, and I had to hold the phone away and turn the volume down. Plus the call quality was some what dodgy – maybe a network issue, but it seemed pretty okay on the iPhone 6 Plus, with the same SIM card.
9. Driving do not disturb is amusing. Do not disturb whilst driving is quite amusing as it thinks I’m driving when I’m on the train, and then starts texting responses to people that I’m not to be disturbed because I’m driving. What’s also quite funny is that all these texts then alerted me that they couldn’t be sent.
10. Visibility of status bar issues – Okay this is a usability moan from me and an iOS 11 issue – but you can’t see the status bar when you turn on/off airplane mode. Therefore you can’t monitor the network, wifi and bluetooth turning off, and then on again. A small thing, but considering how often you need to try and fix the connectivity, it’s a bit of an over sight.
11. Notification center is a bit glitchy. Woah. Glitchy, glitchy glitchy. Initially I couldn’t get any notifications to appear at all. Then all I kept getting was zombie email notifications for the same email over several days. Each time I cleared the notification, it just kept coming back! I was not able to resolve this issue.
12. No full screen photos of videos can be taken for full screen playback. My partner’s Samsung has been doing that for a while, and the fact this £1,000 iPhone 8 cannot do that just sucks some what.

Conclusions

So there are a variety of issues with the iPhone 8, that are likely to be fixable with an update of iOS 11, but there are also some fundamental problems with the hardware of iPhone 8 that I really don’t know if I’m prepared to give it another go. I certainly won’t be buying another Apple iPhone product any time soon.